In 2025, while much of the global tech industry was fixated on scale, funding rounds, and enterprise contracts, Oliyad Tesfaye, an Ethiopian founder and XR developer, made a quieter, more deliberate decision. He stepped away from corporate leadership to focus fully on game development and immersive experiences.

After co-founding Ozone Technology PLC in 2022 and guiding the company through early traction, new customers, media recognition, and an unexpectedly successful first year, he chose to pause his role and redirect his full attention toward game development and extended reality, not as a calculated pivot, but as a return to something deeply personal.

“I realized I had built someone else’s dream,” Oliyad Tesfaye reflects, recalling his time at Ozone. “I founded Ozone as a full-stack developer in my second year of university not because I was deeply passionate about that company, but because I saw the financial potential. I enjoyed building things, but when I sat down to create, something essential was missing.”

That clarity arrived fully on February 13, 2024, the day his father passed away. In the silence that followed, memory took on a new weight. His father’s advice resurfaced with renewed urgency: “You need to follow your passions regardless of what the world tells you.” When Oliyad returned to making after years of distance, the difference was immediate. Each prototype, whether for a video game or a virtual reality experience, felt less like a product and more like a conversation.

“I wasn’t building to generate deliverables or revenue,” he explains. “I was building to create connection.” Encouraged by Dagmawi Bedilu, who asked, “Why don’t you start a game studio?”, Oliyad founded Tobiya Game Studio, not as a business plan, but as an act of alignment.

Designing From Pure Joy

The shift from tech entrepreneur to creator fundamentally changed how Oliyad Tesfaye approaches design. At Ozone, success had been transactional, measured through client satisfaction, timelines, revenue, and technical precision. Even award-winning work ultimately answered one question: did it meet the client’s needs?

Designing from joy demanded a different starting point. Joy was not about making games that were merely fun, but about making work that reflected who he was and the communities he represented. Where he once relied on globally recognized UI patterns to minimize friction, he now draws from Ethiopian visual language, traditional textile patterns, folk rhythms, and the spatial logic shaped by local landscapes, weaving them directly into gameplay and XR environments.

“I no longer feel the need to apologize for my cultural perspective,” Oliyad Tesfaye says. “I’ve realized it’s the foundation of my creativity.”

The questions guiding his work have changed as well. Where he once asked which features would make an app sticky, he now asks which moments will allow a player to pause and feel seen. One VR prototype intentionally avoids points and scores, focusing instead on creating shared presence and emotional connection. The goal is not optimization, but recognition.

What Game Jams Teach Under Pressure

This philosophy was sharpened in the intense, time-compressed environments of international game jams. In 2025 alone, Oliyad Tesfaye and his teams won five major awards, including Best VR Experience at the Echoes Hackathon for Cradle MR, wins at the Green Game Jam, Gamethon, Cyber Game Jam, and the Rising Star Award at Fak’ugesi Festival. These experiences reshaped how he understands creativity itself.

Game jams, he explains, taught him that constraints do not limit expression, they reveal it. Under extreme time pressure, generic ideas collapse, while culturally specific ones gain clarity. Instead of building another abstract meditation app, his team created Cradle MR using Nigerian historical warmth and spatial sound design, developed collaboratively by teammates from Tanzania, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The specificity of the work became its advantage.

Equally transformative was another realization: emotional truth outweighs polish. At Ozone, quality had been measured through bug counts and feature lists. During a jam, however, a judge responded to Save Lagos by saying, “I didn’t just play your game, I felt the urgency to protect the community.” From that moment on, Oliyad Tesfaye committed to building experiences where emotional response mattered more than the number of polygons on screen.

Visibility, Not Talent, Is the Missing Link

His selection as the first Ethiopian participant in the IGDA Foundation Virtual Exchange further reframed his perspective. Entering the program, he carried a quiet assumption shared by many African developers: that the continent was still catching up. Within days, that belief dissolved. Collaborating with indie developers from six continents, he saw that African creators, particularly in mobile optimization, lightweight assets, and narrative-mechanical design, were not only competitive but, in some cases, ahead.

Yet alongside this realization came a sobering truth: capability does not guarantee visibility. While developers from Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa benefit from regional hubs and publishing pipelines, Ethiopian developers remain largely unseen, not due to lack of talent, but because of missing connective infrastructure.

“It’s not that the world is biased against Ethiopia,” Oliyad Tesfaye notes. “It’s that the world simply can’t see what’s happening here.”

An Ecosystem, Not Just a Studio

Through Tobiya Game Studio, Oliyad Tesfaye is not simply building games but prototyping an ecosystem. By publishing culturally rooted, high-quality experiences, Tobiya demonstrates that global excellence can emerge from Ethiopia without relocation. By sharing pipelines, documentation, and access points, he lowers the barrier for others to create without asking permission.

Looking ahead five years, success is not defined by awards or revenue alone. It is defined by absence, the absence of doubt when Ethiopian stories no longer need justification, when a teenager tells their parents they want to be a game developer and hears, “Which studio?” instead of “What is that?”

“The most globally resonant stories,” Oliyad Tesfaye says, “are created when they are rooted in the most culturally specific realities.” And that, ultimately, is what creating from joy means: not escaping where you come from but finally standing fully inside it.